I dreamed I was tied down and couldn’t move. Automatons—cold, mechanical women who made no response when I begged for mercy—would come and go, tightening the machine that held me in place, eliciting mind-numbing pain. I dreamed that I was in an operating room, tied to a table, and a doctor was cramming my femur into the socket. The pain was so immense that I had to die and leave my body. Night upon night I would awaken screaming from these dreams, completely undone and shattered.

I knew I had been treated for hip dysplasia as a baby, and though I was vaguely aware of it from family folklore, I had no memories of my long-term hospital stay. No memories, that is, until the nightmares began. I realized I was reliving deeply buried past experiences and needed to understand more fully and precisely what had happened to me. I began the long process of getting my parents to talk about my seven-month hospital stay.

When I began to walk as a toddler, I toddled all wrong. My unusual gait led my parents to consult with a doctor, and that’s when I was diagnosed with hip dysplasia. Because my father was in the military, my parents had access to a nearby military hospital with a doctor whose specialty happened to be hip dysplasia. A visionary in his field at the time, he was conducting clinical trials of a new treatment technique he had developed. My parents respected his work and liked him very much. I was terribly fond of him too, according to my mother.

At 18 months old I was enrolled in the clinical trial, which meant I was hospitalized and placed in traction. While no photos were taken of me in this state, the images I’ve found for hip dysplasia treatment of small children in the early 1960s seem to belong to an earlier, more medieval age of medicine. My legs were held in the splits by a brace and slowly opened into a full outward rotation over two months. What did this prolonged separation from my family mean to me, and how did my body and mind incorporate what lay outside of memory? Beyond the clues in my nightmares, I found answers that resonated with my lifelong sense of abandonment in Dr. Robert Karen’s book Becoming Attached: First Attachments and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love. In Chapter 6, “A Two-Year-Old Goes to the Hospital,” Karen describes the “emotional catastrophe” wrought by a long hospital stay in early childhood: 

It was not uncommon for a small child to feel that being sent to the hospital was a form of punishment…. The suffering that parents and children endured because of the shortsighted and under-researched policies of hospitals in the 1950s and 1960s that kept parental visits to a minimum in an attempt to modify emotionality was great, especially when the child was very young and incapable of understanding his mother's disappearance for days on end and incapable of anticipating the next visit. To him, the abandonment seemed, on each parting, to be permanent. The feelings engendered in small children might be compared to an older child's learning that his entire family had been killed in a car crash or that everyone he loved on earth had intentionally abandoned him—and then having his rage, his sense of loss, and his feelings of being unwanted redoubled when the perpetrators returned for a surprise visit but refused to stay or take him with them. One can imagine how such a state of affairs, going on for months, would finally exhaust one's ability to hope, lock one into a relatively permanent hardness, and cement one's anger against those who had formerly been so loved, leaving the child with a deep sense of insecurity. 

Over the months, my right hip fell into alignment, but my left hip was too badly dislocated to come into the socket without manual manipulation. When preparing me for this procedure, my nurses discovered that my bottom and back were covered in bedsores, so I was placed in traction on my stomach for another two weeks. Once the sores had healed, I was taken to an operating room, strapped to the table, and restrained with leather straps on my wrists and right ankle.

During the moments that followed, when the doctor manually forced my left femur into its hip socket, I screamed so loudly and for so long that my mother had to leave the hospital. No anesthesia was administered for this procedure. Babies were not thought to have the same reaction to pain as adults. At 18 months I was considered too young to be able to form lasting memories, so it wasn’t worth the unknown risks anesthesia might pose to a baby’s small, sensitive system. 

After this procedure I was put into a body cast, from my ankles to my armpits, which I wore for another four months. After the cast was taken off, I wore a brace at night for the next year and then I wore corrective shoes until I was in the fourth grade. I remembered the shoes—how could I forget those shoes? But now I found myself confronted by the fact that my body clearly remembered what it had experienced as torture. I knew it was time to find some new kind of help, in the face of my physical and emotional pain, if I was ever to move beyond survival mode and really live.

I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). My therapist, a licensed social worker whose focus is trauma, gave me this diagnosis after evaluating my symptoms and the story I had pieced together from my parents’ accounts. Existing treatments for PTSD, my therapist told me, relied primarily on managing trauma symptoms with drugs. The side effects of these drugs are often as bad as or worse than the trauma symptoms themselves, and psychological techniques like exposure therapy, EMDR, and cognitive behavioral therapy have had only limited success in treating PTSD.

At my therapist’s suggestion I began to consider new therapeutic approaches integrating somatic psychology techniques that allow the patient to access and clear from the body the suppressed emotional energy stored there as a result of past trauma. These techniques are assisted, enhanced, and catalyzed by mind-enhancing medicines such as ketamine and cannabis. She also suggested I look into the clinical trials underway to manage, treat, and clear PTSD symptoms with MDMA.

In following her lead, I stepped onto the path that has redefined my relationship with pain, both my own residual trauma and the pain I seek to relieve in the various modalities of therapy I practice.